Scammed? Here's How to Try to Get Your Money Back (UK Guide)

The problem is rarely the scam — it is the pause after it

Most people who lose money to a fraud do not lose it in the moment they pay. They lose it in the hours afterwards, while they sit with the sick feeling and try to talk themselves out of what has happened. That delay is the single most expensive thing about being scammed, because almost every route to a refund rewards speed and punishes waiting. A payment caught within the hour can sometimes be stopped mid-flight; the same payment reported a week later has usually vanished for good.

So this guide is built around acting first and feeling afterwards. It walks through exactly what to do, in what order, depending on how you paid — and it is honest about the fact that some routes recover money reliably while others rarely do. None of it requires you to be an expert, and none of it costs anything. What it asks is that you move now, before the embarrassment convinces you it is too late. Our broader get-money-back guide sits alongside this as a quick-reference companion.

Step one: contact whoever holds your money, immediately

Before you report anything to anyone else, get straight through to your bank, building society or card provider — the organisation that actually moved the money. Most UK banks now print a 24-hour fraud line on the back of the card and inside their app, and many take part in the free 159 service, which connects you to your own bank's fraud team when you dial it. Tell them plainly: you have been scammed, here is the payment, and you want it stopped or recovered.

Two things happen when you call fast. The bank can attempt to freeze or recall the payment before it clears the other end, and it opens a formal fraud case with a timestamp that every later step relies on. Do this even if you feel foolish, and do it before you spend an hour gathering evidence — the evidence can follow the phone call, but the phone call cannot follow a payment that has already gone.

If you paid by card, you have the strongest hand

Card payments come with two separate safety nets, and they are the reason paying by card matters so much in the first place. It is worth knowing which one applies to you, because they work differently.

Chargeback

Chargeback is a rule run by the card networks — Visa, Mastercard and American Express — rather than a law. It lets your bank claw a payment back from the seller's bank when goods never arrive, turn out to be nothing like described, or were charged fraudulently. It covers both debit and credit cards, which makes it the main hope for anyone who paid on a debit card. There is a time limit, commonly around 120 days from the transaction or from the date you expected delivery, so raising it promptly matters. Ask your bank to open a chargeback, describe what went wrong, and hand over your evidence.

Section 75

If you paid for something on a credit card and the item cost more than £100, Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act may give you a stronger claim than chargeback. Under it, the card provider is held equally responsible alongside the seller when a purchase goes wrong, so you can pursue the card company directly for a refund. It applies to single items priced above £100 and up to £30,000, covers credit cards specifically rather than debit, and — unlike chargeback — is a legal protection, not a scheme courtesy. If both routes are open to you, your bank can advise which to pursue, but the headline is simple: a credit card between £100 and £30,000 is the best-protected way you could have paid.

If you sent a bank transfer, the rules have recently changed

For years, a bank transfer to a scammer was treated as gone the instant it left, because you had authorised it yourself. That has shifted. Since October 2024, banks in the UK operate under mandatory reimbursement rules for authorised push payment fraud — the kind where you are tricked into sending money yourself, as in a bank impersonation scam or a fake-invoice con.

In broad terms, if you were deceived into transferring money by Faster Payments or CHAPS to a fraudster, your bank may now have to reimburse you, with the cost shared between the bank that sent the money and the one that received it. Reimbursement is usually made within a few business days, up to a per-claim cap, and the process starts the moment you report the fraud. It is not automatic or unconditional: there are exceptions, a claim can be reduced or refused where someone ignored clear, specific warnings or acted with real carelessness, and some payment types fall outside the scheme. So treat it as a genuine reason to report rather than a guaranteed payout — but do not write off a transfer as unrecoverable the way you once had to. Report it, make your case, and let the bank assess it.

If you paid another way, act fast but expect less

Some payment methods were chosen by the scammer precisely because they are hard to reverse, and honesty helps here more than false hope.

• Cryptocurrency transfers are effectively irreversible once confirmed. Report it to your bank and the authorities anyway, and if you sent it through an exchange, contact them at once — occasionally funds can be frozen before they move on.
• Gift-card codes are gone as soon as the code is read out or spent. Tell the card's issuer immediately regardless; on rare occasions an unredeemed balance can be frozen.
• PayPal or similar sent as "friends and family" carries no buyer protection, unlike a "goods and services" payment. Open a case anyway and explain it was fraud, but the odds are poorer than a card purchase.

The pattern across all of these is the one covered in our companion piece on the safest ways to pay online: the harder a method is to reverse, the more a scammer prefers it, and the thinner your recovery options become.

Report it — and where you report depends on where you live

Reporting fraud is not only about your own refund; it feeds the intelligence that gets sites taken down and accounts frozen for the next person. Where you report depends on which part of the UK you are in, and this catches people out.

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, report fraud to Action Fraud, the national reporting centre, online or by phone. In Scotland, Action Fraud is not the route — report the crime to Police Scotland by calling 101 instead. Wherever you are, if a crime is in progress or you are in immediate danger, that is 999. Separately, you can forward a scam text to 7726 so your mobile network can trace it, and send a suspicious email to the National Cyber Security Centre's reporting address at [email protected].

Lock down everything the scammer may have touched

Money is only half of it. If you typed details into a fraudulent page or spoke them aloud on a call, assume they are compromised and shut the doors.

| What was exposed | What to do now | | --- | --- | | Card number | Ask the provider to cancel and reissue the card | | Online banking login | Change the password and turn on two-step verification | | A password reused elsewhere | Change it on every account that shared it | | Personal details (name, address, date of birth) | Watch for follow-up calls; consider a protective registration with a fraud-prevention service | | Your identity generally | Check your credit report for accounts you did not open — a sign of identity theft |

Be especially wary of a follow-up in the days after: fraudsters routinely use what they learned to phone you posing as your bank's fraud team, armed with your name and your recent "payment". That call is a second attempt, not a rescue.

Beware the second wolf: recovery scams

There is a particularly cruel epilogue you need to see coming. Weeks or months after a loss, many victims are contacted by someone promising to recover the stolen money — for an upfront fee, or after you share your bank details "to receive the funds". This is a recovery scam, a fresh fraud aimed squarely at people already hurt once, sometimes run by the same criminals working from a list of their own victims. It is a form of advance-fee fraud: pay now, receive nothing later.

Hold one line and it cannot touch you. Genuine refunds come back through your bank, your card provider or the official reimbursement rules — never through a stranger who contacts you out of the blue and asks for money first. Any "fund recovery agent" demanding payment to release your money is the con, not the cure.

Before you go

Notice what every step above has in common: none of them are about the scammer, and all of them are about the clock. You cannot un-send the payment, argue with the criminal or undo the mistake — but you can decide how fast the next hour goes, and that decision is the only variable still in your hands. Shame slows people down; treat that as the tactic it effectively is, and let it be the thing you refuse.

So if it has just happened, stop reading and make the call — the bank first, the report second, the passwords third — and come back for the detail once the wheels are turning. This guide is about the moment after the money is already gone. The CheckAScam checker taking shape belongs to the moment before it, weighing a site's signals while your money is still yours to keep; it is not finished yet, and it was never going to be the thing that reverses a payment you have already made. For anyone beside you who has not paid, that earlier check is where it will earn its place — but for you, right now, speed is the whole game.